Taking up the "motor" child first, as before, we find that his
psychological growth tends to confirm him in his hereditary type. In
all his social dealing with other children he is more or less
domineering and self-assertive; or at least his conduct leads one to
form that opinion of him. He seems to be constantly impelled to act so
as to show himself off. He "performs" before people, shows less
modesty than may be thought desirable in one of his tender years,
impresses the forms of his own activity upon the other children, who
come to stand about him with minds constrained to follow him. He is an
object lesson in both the advantages and the risks of an aggressive
life policy. He has a suggestion to make in every emergency, a line of
conduct for each of his company, all marked out or supplied on the
spur of the moment by his own quick sense of appropriate action; and
for him, as for no one else, to hesitate is to be lost.
Now what this general policy or method of growth means to his
consciousness is becoming more and more clear in the light of the
theory of mental types. The reason a person is motor is that his mind
tends always to be filled up most easily with memories or revived
images of the twitchings, tensions, contractions, expansions, of the
activities of the muscular system. He is a motor because the means of
his thought generally, the mental coins which pass current in his
thought exchange, are muscular sensations or the traces which such
sensations have left in his memory. The very means by which he thinks
of a situation, an event, a duty, is not the way it looked, or the way
it sounded, or the way it smelt, tasted, or felt to the touch--in any
of the experiences to which these senses are involved--but the means,
the representatives, the instruments of his thought, are the feelings
of the way he has acted. He has a tendency--and he comes to have it
more and more--to get a muscular representation of everything; and his
gauge of the value of this or that is this muscular measure of it, in
terms of the action which it is calculated to draw out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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